The exhaustion of the remaining pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses is approaching within the next few years and this may create some problems for the Internet, unless we make some smart choices. These decisions need to be planned well in advance if we want to ensure that the changes are as trouble-free, painless and inexpensive as possible.

This paper analyze the situation and classifies the potential mitigations for the IPv4 exhaustion problem into two basic categories: Temporary and Permanent mitigations.